Sprachliche Kategorisierungsverfahren und subjektive Theorien über Sprache in narrativen Interviews

Abstract

Various recent studies dealing with personal experiences of migration have addressed questions of identity by referring to the topos of “the third space” (Bhaba, The location of culture, Routledge, 2006): People who have migrated to Germany often classify themselves in narrative interviews as “sitting between two chairs” (Foroutan/Schäfer, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 5: 11–18, 2009) or as being “bi-local” (Spohn, Zweiheimisch. Bikulturell leben in Deutschland, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2006). However, such categorizations are often treated outside the context in which they were articulated to an interviewer. This article analyses the interactive settings of categorization sequences in which identity is negotiated by (dis)aligning with social categories that the speakers themselves set as relevant. Based on a corpus of narrative interviews with people of Vietnamese origin living in West-Germany, it is argued that categorization is a highly context-dependent communicative strategy in which practices of self and other positioning are applied on different levels of interaction with the interviewer. Moreover, “categorical formulations” (Ayaß, „Form und Funktion Kategorischer Formulierungen“, Opladen, 1999a, „Vom Ursprung der Sprichwörter und ihrem Schicksal“, Opladen, b, Nazarkiewicz, Interkulturelles Lernen als Gesprächsarbeit, VS Verlag, 2010) contextualise these categorizations as moral communication.